What's the difference between airport runway and ordinary pavement? Why is the airport runway so expensive?

The cost of airstrips is much higher than that of ordinary roads. After all, the airstrip is dedicated to the take-off and landing of aircraft, and an aircraft is tens of hundreds of tons at any time. If the pavement quality is poor, the plane is prone to accidents, which will eventually lead to irreparable consequences. Let's learn about the construction technology and cost of the airstrip together.

The airstrip is mainly composed of four processes, namely tamping foundation, stone layer, gravel layer and pavement layer. Rammed foundation and stone layer, just like the foundation of a house, play the role of fixing and tamping to prevent the airport runway from being crushed by gravity, and the gravel layer, which we call the leveling layer, is mainly used to help the pavement level, so as to control the height difference of the runway to a minimum, which is much higher than the expressway pavement.

After all, the take-off and landing speed of aircraft is above 200km/h, if the road surface is uneven, it will affect the take-off and landing of aircraft, and the consequences are unimaginable.

Finally, the pavement, namely cement concrete pavement or asphalt concrete pavement. At present, most domestic airport runways in China use cement concrete pavement, which has high compressive strength and is not easy to be damaged, and is very suitable for the take-off and landing of large aircraft.

There are also a few airports that use asphalt concrete pavement. Its main advantages are high friction, difficult aircraft skidding and convenient later maintenance.

Runway is an important infrastructure for aircraft to take off and land at the airport, which is related to the operational safety and support capacity of the airport.

Taking the Capital Airport as an example, the Capital Airport regularly conducts "health check-ups" on three runways, formulates detailed daily, weekly and monthly maintenance plans, and timely discovers and handles runway pavement problems. Daily maintenance work includes: runway inspection (regularly check the sanitary condition of the runway, mainly check whether there is any disease on the runway, etc. ), track cleaning (using track sweeper to clean foreign bodies), pavement repair (repairing pavement cracks in time, etc. ), and friction coefficient test (an important indicator to test the applicability of the runway, the runway surface is tested at least once a week, mainly through the friction coefficient test vehicle). At the same time, the Capital Airport will conduct an annual survey of the runway pavement conditions.